


in dreams, i meet you in warm conversation

by carrotstix



Category: Until Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Beth survives the original fall, Canon Divergence, F/F, Hospitals, nobody eats each other, there are no wendigos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-31
Updated: 2015-12-31
Packaged: 2018-05-10 18:15:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5595955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carrotstix/pseuds/carrotstix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nearly a month after 'the Incident', a search and rescue team find the Washington twins in an abandoned mine system. Both girls are alive, Hannah herself conscious and most uninjured, but Beth is a more serious case. The younger twin has been in a comatose like state since the team found the sisters, and nobody's really quite sure she'll ever wake up.</p><p>Sam, of course, gets to play the waiting game to see if her- Beth is going to wake up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. hopeful they'll be and long they will wait

**Author's Note:**

> because until dawn has me wrekt for sam the gay vegan  
> work and chapter titles from 'sad beautiful tragic' by taylor swift

Her phone lights up on a Saturday evening, and when the caller ID reads Josh, she isn’t much surprised. The two of them have been talking a lot ‘the Incident’, as they referred to it now. In several ways, they were the only ones who could really understand each other, being the two closest to the twins and the biggest believers that the two of them were still alive. Josh was their older brother, the eldest Washington sibling, and he had grown up protective of his sisters, growing close to both of them when it seemed like their parents were not. Sam had been Hannah’s best friend, and Beth’s… well, something. They had been something.

But when she picks up the phone, she doesn’t expect to hear what she does.

“It’s the twins,” Josh says, sounding winded and out of breath. “They found them. They’re alive.”

\--

The drive to the hospital is short and yet it seems to drag on forever.

Her mother drives in silence, eyes fixed on the road ahead, trying to ignore her daughter’s incessant bouncing of her leg in the passenger seat, anxiety painted across her face. Josh had warned her that while they were alive, they weren’t fine. Hannah was surprisingly mostly uninjured, with a couple smaller scars and a broken leg, but Beth hadn’t gotten of nearly as easy. They said she hit the edge of her back on a rock, and while the injuries weren’t necessarily serious, they had been ignored for nearly a month, and coupled with the malnourishment of being separated from food for she was far from a good condition. Josh hadn’t told her much more than that, but the worry in her voice had pushed her into a near sprint, getting dressed and nearly dragging her mother into the car. Sam would’ve driven herself, of course, if she thought she could focus that well. The panic in her chest, of course, said otherwise.

She springs from the car the second they get to the hospital, and Josh is sitting in the lobby, staring down at his hands as if he doesn’t know what to do with himself.

“Josh!” she calls, causing his head to shoot up and his eyes to widen when he saw her. He exhaled, seeming to calm some, and stood up from his chair, giving her a weak but real smile.

“Hannah’s awake,” he says, and even though she can still feel the panic pumping through the veins beneath her skin, something in her chest cries out in relief. Her best friend is alive, she’s awake and she’s back.

“Beth?” she asks, and his face drops some.

“She’s alive,” he says, and Sam practically reaches out for those words, pulls them close to her chest and holding on to them like a lifeline against whatever he’s about to tell her next. “But she’s was fading in and out when they brought her in, and while she’s been stabilizing some, she hasn’t woken up yet.”

“Okay,” she says, nodding once and forcing herself to inhale, pushing the air down her throat and doing her best to keep breathing. _She’s alive,_ her mind repeats. _Beth is alive. They’ve found her and she’s alive._

“Can I see Hannah?” she asks.

Josh nods, and begins leading her back through the hospital hallways. She expects a nurse to stop them on their way, spouting some ‘family only’ policy and forcing her back to lobby, but instead they just watch them as they walk by. The privileges of being a Washington seem to apply everywhere, including the hospital.

They ride up to Hannah’s floor in an elevator with a woman dressed in scrubs who smiles at them, and Sam does her best attempt to return it. She feels shaky all over, palms sweaty and her heart thumping in her chest. They get off on the fifth floor and Sam might be tempted to break into a sprint if it weren’t for the fact that she’d only be able to get lost without Josh at her side.

The room they have her in has a man stationed outside who, although appearing less than friendly at first glance, gives them a small smile as they enter, greeting Josh by name.

Hannah is lying awake in bed, and Sam has to do a double take. While the girl in the hospital gown is most certainly her best friend, the normally well-kept black locks tied back in a tangled-looking ponytail, and she looks so _thin._ Her cheeks are sunken in, and while there is defiantly color hiding there, she looks paler than usual. Still, she looks up and brightens when she sees Sam standing in the doorway.

“Sam!” she says, and while her voice sounds almost as if she’d been gargling with gravel, she sounds pleased to see her, bringing an actual genuine smile to Sam’s face.

“You have no idea how glad I am to see you, Han,” the blonde says, taking a seat in the chair by the girl’s bed.

“I think I do,” Hannah says, her smile quirked. “I never thought I’d see you guys again.”

“I hoped,” Sam replied, trying to fight the warm tears she could feel welling behind her eyelids. “I was starting to get really scared though.”

“You can stop,” the brunette replies, warmth flooding her voice. “I’m here.”

\--

They talk and talk and Sam feels so happy until she remembers Beth. Beth, lying in a bed somewhere in the hospital with her eyes closed and nurses flitting around, waiting to see if she’ll wake up.

Her face must darken because Hannah’s own seems to shift, head tilting and the laughter trickling out of her eyes. “Hey,” she says, pulling the older girl’s attention back onto her. “Beth is going to be okay, alright? She’s strong.”

“How can you be so sure?” Sam says, voice fraying on the ends. The tears from earlier are back, tinged with sadness rather than relief, and Sam thinks she might crack.

“Beth is strong,” Hannah tells her. “Beth is so strong, stronger than me. She was the one who kept telling me to have faith, that we would get out of there alive. She’ll make it out.”

“I should be the one comforting you,” Sam chokes out, the words stinging her throat the whole way up.

“I guess I’m just a really great friend,” Hannah replies, and although the laugh Sam gives is watery, it’s there.

\--

Sam ends up leaving Hannah to get some sleep, wandering out into the lobby and curling up onto a chair to wait, but for what, she isn’t sure.

She falls asleep at some point, bent up in a chair, because she wakes up to Josh gently prodding her with some sort of granola or energy bar in his hand.

“It’s vegan,” he says as he hands it to her, and something about it touches her. He watches in silence as she opens it and takes a couple bites, waiting until she’s nearly halfway done with it before speaking again.

“Also, Beth isn’t awake, but you can see her if you want.”

She pauses, bar between her teeth and looks up at him through wide eyes.

\--

Beth’s room is two floors beneath her sister’s, and there’s something not funny at all about the fact that it’s basically right below Hannah’s.

Josh doesn’t enter the room, instead letting her walk in alone. Right away, it all feels different from Hannah’s. The TV is off, and the air feels far heavier than it has anywhere else in the hospital, but maybe that’s just the girl in there herself that does it to Sam.

She had thought Hannah had looked pale, but Beth looked far lighter, rivaling Sam’s own skin tone. Her hair was limp, fanned across her pillow, and Sam wished she had a beanie to pull over the girl’s head.

She wondered if Beth was cold.

The chair in the room is pulled up right beside the bed, and Sam almost feels weird sitting in it. It’s like the room itself is stiff, like the starched shirt her brother wore to his first job interview. It feels like she’s been stuffed inside of his straight-jacket of a shirt, moment limited and limbs stiff.

God, she never thought she would have to see Beth like this.

She reaches out to grab the other girl’s hand, taking comfort in the steady beeping of the heart monitor and the pulse she can feel on the girl’s wrist when she places her fingers there.

“Hey Beth,” she says, doing her best to steady her already uneven breathing. Just the sight of her lying there is enough to make you feel sick to the stomach. You can’t think about how much you would give to be there instead of her.

“You’re alive,” Sam states, more to herself than the body on the bed. “That’s good, right? I mean, you’re here instead of somewhere in cave. And you’re breathing and your heart is beating. That’s all good.”

The tears come in a wave, catching her off guard and smacking her right in the face like a wrecking ball. Her shoulders hunch as a sob tears its way from her throat, followed by several more.

 _“Oh my God,”_ she whimpers through the tears. “ _Oh my God, Beth.”_

Sam can feel her chest splintering into pieces, and it’s all she can do to focus on the monitor, on the steady _beep beep beep_ that tells her that Beth is still there, somewhere, and that maybe she’ll wake up, maybe she’ll just-

“Sam?”

She looks up to see Josh standing in the doorway, his own eyes watering and his face dappled with sympathy. Sympathy for her, while his own sisters lie in hospital beds.

She lets him pull her into his arms and sobs against his chest until her eyes are dry and she feels tired enough to fall back asleep again.

\--

Her mom drags her away from the hospital to back home, and she can see the pity in her brother and father’s eyes when they look at her. Something inside of her wants to push it away, tell them that she doesn’t deserve anybody’s pity when Beth is laid up in hospital bed with a chance of never waking up again, but she doesn’t. Instead she only watches as they dance around her on eggshells, afraid to approach her when the ever-present optimism has crumbled and left her scattered on the floor.

She tries to bring smiles back to her face, plasters them on when she goes back to visit Hannah every day, clinging to her best friend, the Washington twin who opens her eyes. In some ways, she wonders how Hannah manages to keep bright, to keep this belief that her sister will wake up.

Sam hopes, and now more than ever she should have reason to believe that good things will happen for Beth, but nothing feels right to her. She feels as if she’s stuck in an arena, waiting for the knockout punch to hit her.

Josh hits her first.

She’s back at the hospital, sitting in the plastic chair beside Hannah as they mindlessly pick apart some cable sitcom playing on the TV when she falls asleep, passing out on the edge of the other girl’s bed without even realizing she was tired, and wakes to find Josh smacking her shoulder.

“Sam!” he hisses. “Sam, wake up!”

She shoots up, caught off guard and suddenly on the alert. “What?”

“It’s Beth,” he cries. “She’s awake.”

\--

They run all the way to Beth’s room from Hannah’s, ignoring the one nurse who had politely asked them to slow down, even forgoing to elevator to instead trample down two flights of stairs.

Sam practically throws the door off of it’s hinges trying to open it, stumbling in and freezing when she sees Beth sitting up in her bed, blinking at her with bright brown eyes.

“Hey,” the other girl says, and Sam cries.

“You’re awake,” she murmurs, flopping into the chair by the bed. “You’re awake, I was so afraid-”

“Hey, hey,” Beth croaks, reaching out to take the blonde’s hand. “Hey, Sam, it’s okay now.”

Sam only nods, tears dripping off of her face and onto the floor. “I was beginning to think you were never going to wake up.”

Beth tugs her hand closer until Sam is practically leaning over her body, and Beth takes the opportunity to lean up just enough to kiss her.

“It’s okay,” she whispers against the blonde’s lips. “I’m here, alright? Everything is fine.”

Sam let out a weak breath and gave a tiny smile. “God, I love you so much, you know that, right?”

“I’ve never doubted it,” the other girl replied.

\--

She wakes up to the ringing of her phone on a Tuesday morning.

“She’s gone,” Josh’s voice tells her, and Sam breaks.


	2. words, how little they mean when they're a little too late

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A funeral for the dead

The black dress she wears feels heavy against her skin, weighing down on her shoulders and making each step feel like an effort.

Everywhere she looks, everyone she sees is draped in black: dresses and skirts and suits. The remaining Washington twin clings to her hand, her breathing uneven and tear tracks permanently stained onto her face. It makes Sam ache to see her this way, looking so lost without the other half she’s always known.

The ceremony is filled with people, standing quiet with their heads bowed and tears in their eyes. Sam wonders how many people even knew the girl in the coffin, how many of them even cared about her until she died.

The press outside make her blood boil, all of them standing there like hound dogs waiting to jump on the Washington tragedy. One of them had tried to stop her on her way in, to question her, but she had only turned away and allowed herself to be pulled through the front doors without saying a word.

People give speeches and eulogies, starting with the parents and moving on to Josh, who can barely keep himself together, stumbling over words and losing his train of thought halfway through his sentences, and he goes back to his seat in hiccupping sobs, sitting down at the end of the pew and beckoning for his sister to go up next.

She walks up to the front with her head bowed and her body trembling, steps shaking as if she’s still unsure of her movements. When she gets to the altar, she looks out over the crowd of people and Sam sees the way she almost loses it right there.

“My sister was the best person I ever knew,” she says, gripping the wood to support herself. “She was kind, and warm, and loving. Sure, she didn’t always make the best decisions, but she was only human. She never deserved to go out like this, and I wish more than anything that it could have been me. Hannah was kind, amazing, and I will never forget her.”

Beth stumbles back to her spot beside Sam, falling into her seat as she begins to bawl, dropping her head into her hands. The blonde presses closer to her, rubbing a hand over her back and squeezing her shoulder as Josh reaches out to take one of her hands.

“She’s gone,” she chokes. “My sister is gone.”

\--

_“There’s been- something went wrong. There were internal injuries, um- bleeding or a rupture or something? I don’t, I don’t even know, but they missed it and- oh God… they missed it and it was really bad. Hannah- she’s gone, Sam. She died this morning.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i wholly blame dogmeatisbae for the angst, because this was supposed to be a happy fic but she didn't want that. orginally, i was going to kill beth, but then i decided to switch it up.


End file.
